AI models feel smarter than their real-world impact. They ace benchmarks, yet still struggle with reliability, strange bugs, and shallow generalization. Why is there such a gap between what they can do on paper and in practice

In this episode from The Dwarkesh Podcast, Dwarkesh talks with Ilya Sutskever, cofounder of SSI and former OpenAI chief scientist, about what is actually blocking progress toward AGI. They explore why RL and pretraining scale so differently, why models outperform on evals but underperform in real use, and why human style generalization remains far ahead.

Ilya also discusses value functions, emotions as a built-in reward system, the limits of pretraining, continual learning, superintelligence, and what an AI driven economy could look like.

Resources:

Transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ilya-sutsk...

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7naO...

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Stay Updated:

Find a16z on X

Find a16z on LinkedIn

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Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg

Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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